“I have seen with joy that Frederic has an utter aversion to the society of fops, spendthrifts and skeptics. I believe that his moral principles are assured, his religious faith clear. Yet I fear that he is sometimes too impressible, too passive and yielding. His will needs strengthening, not subduing. Teach him to be watchful of his independence, to guard jealously his manliness. I know that I need not charge you to infuse into his mind a true patriotic spirit, free from cant and bravado—to counsel him against poor party feuds and narrow political prejudices. God grant that you may live to see our son if not one of the world’s great men, one whose pure life shall radiate good and happiness—whose strong and symmetrical character shall be a lesson of moral greatness, a type of true manhood.
“Our daughter Pauline is a happy and healthful girl, with a good, though by no means a great intellect. She has a dangerous dower in her rare beauty, and I pray you, dear Frederic, teach her not to glory in that perishing gift. She is not, I fear, utterly free from vanity, and she is sometimes arrogant and willful. I have even seen her show a consciousness of her personal advantages toward her less favored sister. You will seek to check this imperiousness, to subdue this will—but not with severity, for with all, Pauline is warm-hearted and generous. You know that she is tall for her age, and is fast putting away childish things. It will not be long now before as a young lady she will enter society. I surely need not charge you to be ever near her—to watch well lest a poor passion for dress and a love of admiration invade and take possession of her mind, lowering her to the heartless level of fashionable life; to teach her to despise flatterers and fops—to shrink from the ostentatious, the sensual, the profane, the scoffing and unbelieving. I feel assured that you will imbue her spirit with your own reverence for honest worth, and your own noble enthusiasm for truth and the right—an enthusiasm never lovelier than when it lights the eye and glows on the lips of a lovely woman.
“For my daughter Louise, our youngest, I have most anxiety, for she seems to have inherited my own physical delicacy, and has moreover an intense affectionateness and a morbid sensibility, which together are a misfortune. Dear husband, deal gently with this poor little girl of mine, for to you I will confess that at this hour she lies nearest my heart. Her whole nature seems to overflow with love for all about her, but the sweet waters are ever being embittered by the feeling that she is not herself an object of pride, scarcely of affection to us. She is very plain, you know—yet, look at her, she is not ugly—her plainness is that of languor and ill health. Poor Louise is seldom well, though she never complains, except mutely, through her pallor and weakness. She also inherits from me an absorbing passion for reading and study, and perhaps you will think it strange in me when I call upon you—earnestly entreat you to thwart and overcome this, if possible—not forcibly, nor suddenly, but by substituting other pleasures and pursuits, thus turning the current of her thoughts.